oh...there's my happy place.
Friday, Jul. 29, 2005, 9:36 PM

One summer when I was about 11 years old, I was staying at my grandparents' farm in rural Iowa. I suppose my folks were on vacation or something, but it was no hardship for me to be there. My grandma was as voracious a reader as I, and the place was stuffed to the rafters with books and decades worth of magazines of every description. It was a big old, Federal-style farmhouse, almost a hundred years old, and full of interesting things to discover.

As a dedicated bookworm, I loved to be there. My Grammie was never exasperated with me for having my nose in a book, my room was big a big, airy haven, with lace-curtained windows on three sides, a creaky old bed, and embroidered dresser scarves on the antique bureau and dressing table. And most importantly--a big, comfy chair just right for curling up and reading for hours.

On that particular occasion, I was reading one of the many �ladies� magazines� that filled the house. I believe it was Good Housekeeping. It could just as easily have been Redbook or McCall�s. It was one of the big ones, anyway.

Back in the dim mists of history (around 1974), the major periodicals published a lot of fiction. And this particular issue had a story called �Moonraker�s Bride�, by one Madeleine Brent.

It had everything, as far as I was concerned. Mystery, romance, exotic locales, and even a little history. I devoured it.

The main character was an English girl raised in a Chinese orphanage after her parents died of cholera. She subsequently marries and is widowed in 24 hours, moves to England, is courted by a neighbor--and sworn enemy--of the family who takes her in, finds out the butler is her father-in-law, finds out she is an heiress, is nearly murdered, risks her life to save a small boy lost in a blizzard, discovers the whereabouts of a fortune in missing emeralds, finds out her husband is still alive, falls in love with him, follows him back to China, fights in the boxer rebellion, saves her husband�s life, travels back to England, and lives happily ever after.

Whew.

What young girl wouldn�t eat that up with a spoon?

Well, anyway...I never forgot that story. After I got older, and re-examined my memory of the book, I realized that it was an unabashed, full-on, bodice ripper of a romance. But still, I kept a fondness for the tale, and for the memory of an unalloyed pleasure: reading a gripping tale from start to finish, undisturbed, in that big, airy bedroom at Grammies.

When I found a copy sitting on the book sale rack at the library the other day, you know I snatched that sucker up.

And today, in my foul mood, I got home and said what the hell. I grabbed it, curled up in the big comfy chair, and read it. Start to finish, cover to cover.

It was wonderfully restorative. But it piqued my curiosity, and I went exploring to find out something about the author, Madeleine Brent. I don�t really know what I expected to find out, but it wasn�t this:

Madeleine Brent? Is Peter O�Donnell.

That threw me a little.